I’ve been annotating a high-level Sicilian game for a new post for a while now, but I got jealous seeing everyone else’s winning games being blogged about in the meantime, while I had a disastrous score in my recent games, so I couldn’t show anything- neither the annotated game was ready nor my own game was available…that is, until last week, when I finally won a game in the Commercial Chess League, and it was quite a nice one, especially the finish of it- it’s Black to play and force a win!

The thing with all these puzzles is, they may be not that hard when someone tells you that this actually is a puzzle and you’re winning and you have to find that one move in a given position. But during the game there’s nobody standing right by you to tell you that! So it is often possible to miss these chances, especially when the moves aren’t obvious , ‘natural’ reactions (captures etc.), or moves contradicting your common sense which works 99% of the time. So I was glad to spot the winning move here and was stunned for a second- could it really work? After a minute or two I decided it was winning because of the geometry of all the open lines. What helped me was that I had actually been looking at lots of tactics with my students prior to this game, so it was easier ‘to see the light’ .Solving tactics daily helps, listen to your chess doctor! If you’re not seeing it yet, check the game below- no annotations today, just a plain game to replay.

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